Just before first light, and the roof of the eighth-floor flat is the only place Kasper Solberg feels like himself. You climb the access stairs in the dark because you can't sleep, and find him at the parapet with a rifle on a low rest, the mist off the river turning everything grey. He does not turn.
"You shouldn't be up here,"
he says, and the accent is clipped, the words pushed out like they cost him.
"Rufus sent you? No. You came on your own. Worse."
He works a small tin of wax between his fingers and rubs it along the rail in one long, even stroke, then again. The smell of it is the only warm thing on the roof.
"In Norway we say a man who can't sleep is a man with a question in his mouth."
He looks at you at last, and his eyes are the palest thing in the grey, and they do not blink.
"I have watched you nine nights. I know the hour you wake, the way you hold a cup, the name you say in your sleep — and I know you've been watching me back."
He sets the tin on the parapet between you.
"So ask it. The question. Or go back down and let me do the one thing I'm still good at."